Ramadan, part two (prayer and meditation)

I do not pray.

I had not taken this into account when deciding to observe Ramadan this year. I'm nearly a week into the month, and I have continued to put off adding the five daily prayers of Islam into my practice.

So, on Saturday, I set out to learn what kind of prayer should be said in the following morning. I decided I would start slowly, and on Sunday I would say only the salat al-Fajr, as accompaniment to my morning meal. Then, I thought, I might add one prayer per day until complete.

I did of course assume that any prayer I might find would be addressed to God.

While this conflicts with my atheism, long association with my religious family has taught me to translate prayers into a language that makes more sense to me, which is what I assumed I would do with the Fajr. I speculated that as a morning prayer, it might likely take the form of thanking God for the day, which I would translate into generalized gratitude for the start of the morning. Or it might ask God for strength and courage to go out into the world, which I would translate into a rumination on the strength and courage I might find within.

However, what I found while looking for sample Fajr prayers is that the subject of the Fajr prayer is largely God himself. Allahu akbar, and so on. "Glory be to You, O Allah!" "Yours is the praise and blessed is Your name." "I seek refuge in Allah from the accursed Satan." Etc. Etc.

I do feel somewhat like I am being untrue to the spirit of my intention to explore the world's religions when I reject elements that don't ring true with my worldview, but that's exactly what I did.

I came across a drawing of a man saying his Fajr on a prayer rug and noticed that his pose looked very similar the “child's pose” in yoga. Because yoga is as disciplined a practice as prayer, I felt I had found a compromise, and that yoga would be a suitable substitute. I told myself that if I were to find, while doing yoga, some sort of desire to "pray" or "meditate," then I would, but I would not force myself.

So, on Sunday, I rose early, consumed the early meal, and did fifteen minutes of yogic stretching while listening to "Speaking of Faith" on NPR.

The guest was Dr. Esther Sternberg, a scientist of Jewish heritage who studies the connection between stress and disease, as well as the opposite of that -- the connection between belief and healing.

When the host asked Dr. Sternberg, "What do you mean by belief?," my ears perked up. “Good question,“ I thought. “Belief in what, Dr. Sternberg?"

But Sternberg punted and rambled and did not answer the question.

I finished my yoga without praying or meditating, and dressed for Quaker meeting.

I was to meet my friend, an old housemate of mine, in the garden next to the Friends meetinghouse, about a 25 minute walk from my apartment. I arrived early, so I could read a sura from the Koran while I waited.

When my old housemate arrived, she showed me around the building, and explained that there are three services held there: the early, smaller, silent meeting that we would be attending; a larger meeting that is also largely silent but punctuated by "spoken messages;" and a "special welcome" meeting for gays and lesbians, which my friend had never been to.

She showed me into a small room called "the parlor" where the small, silent meeting would take place.

The room was furnished with antiques, and the walls were lined with bookshelves. Two windows showed tall hedges outside and did not let in light. A mantelpiece was topped with a small ticking clock. An older woman in a sweatsuit and sneakers sat on a crimson chair with wooden arms. An older gentleman in a suit with a T-shirt and shiny, polished black shoes sat at one end of a narrow sofa. I said hello to them, and felt very loud when I did. They nodded their greetings back.

My friend took one end of another narrow sofa, and I sat in a matching crimson armchair. It was 8:59. Another older woman entered and sat next to me just before 9AM, and five more Friends trickled in during the first five minutes of Meeting, bringing our number to a gender-balanced ten. The last to arrive was an old man with restless legs who shook the books on the shelves when he trotted his knees up and down.

Other than the fidgety old man and occasional crossing and uncrossing of legs by others, there was no movement. The sounds were of the ticking clock and the birds outside.

What is everybody thinking about, I wondered.

Are they ... praying? Meditating?

I find it difficult to clear my mind of thoughts, and so my mind ranged widely across topics, most of which were no doubt improper for the Friends' meeting: my schedule for the week, my schedule for the day, the physical appearances of the others in the room, speculations on the others’ thoughts, speculations on the schedule for their days, questions for Dr. Esther Sternberg, yoga, sex, Ramadan, food, imagined conversations with friends and family, imagined instructions to myself to still my mind, reflections upon the furnishings and mood of the room.

In the church I belonged to growing up, time for silent meditation was brief and targeted. It occurred immediately following the taking of communion, and lasted for the length of one hymn on the organ. At Meeting, I let my mind recall the feeling of taking communion as a child, and how surprised I had been, around age ten, when my Sunday School teacher informed me it is a sin not to think about Jesus and his sacrifice during the organ music after consuming the wafer and the grape juice.

I had been baptized at age nine, and not all of my peers were baptized yet (meaning they could not take communion, and therefore did not have to worry about this sin), and I remember taking note that I had a potential sin in front of me that they did not. I remember being a child whose mind would wander after communion, only to be yanked back to Jesus as soon as I realized it, along with a quick and fervent prayer for forgiveness from Him of my wandering-mind sin.

Is there any particulary topic toward which I should yank my mind right now, I wondered to myself in Quaker meeting.

At around the forty-five-minute mark, a happy random thought about my sister and my childhood caused me to break out in a smile, which I instantly wiped away, feeling excessively emotional. I'd perceived no other signs of feeling in the room. Ten minutes later or so, some sad thoughts about lovelessness and betrayal caused two fat tears to well up and then to fall, one from each eye. Sitting silent in the peacefulness of the Friends' parlor, I felt like maybe a manic-depressive for such outbursts of emotion.

Moments later, my friend called the meeting to a close. At 10AM sharp, she spoke: "Good morning, Friends," and we all rose to shake hands with one another, me with two wet spots on my shirt that appeared to go unnoticed. My friend made a few small announcements, and we were dismissed.

I wanted to talk to her about what Quaker meeting means to her, but she had a brunch to go to right away, and besides I am fasting, so I hope to attend one (or probably both) of the other meetings, and corner my friend (who was reared without religion at all) about her choice to throw in with the Quakers.

Ramadan, part one (my first post)

Welcome to my blog.

I intended to start this blog one week ago, on my 34th birthday, but it was not to be. I went to the beach for my birthday instead, and delayed the launch of the blog until I got back.

I'll keep this project going for at least one year, and if I don't get lazy on my intentions for the blog, I'll be updating it semi-regularly with thoughts and reflections about religion, and short narratives about experiences with religious communities. Over the next year, I will seek to:


1. accompany friends, acquaintances, and others to their various houses of worship,
2. visit various houses of worship alone, when no companion can be found,
3. read more about the religions of the world,
4. observe as many religious holidays as I can over the course of the calendar year, birthday to birthday.

It's Ramadan right now.

Observance of Ramadan began during the most recent new moon, at sundown last Monday, September 1. Leading up to the beginning of the holiday, I knew only one primary fact about Ramadan: that the observance centers around a daylong fast, broken at sunset by a meal called iftar.

So, on Tuesday, September 2, I rose early to beat the sunrise, and to eat a somewhat larger breakfast than normal in preparation for the fast. I toasted a bagel, scrambled some eggs with cheese and tomato, and cooked some veggie sausage patties. I brewed what I realized would be my only coffee of the day, and read the newspaper over breakfast while the neighborhood outside my dining room window began its day in the dark.

It was around 6AM, and I'm rarely awake at that hour. I listened to even more NPR than normal that day as I prepared (unrushed!) for work, and eventually strolled leisurely to my downtown office, arriving by 8AM, the first one there. I normally arrive between 9 and 9:30, and yet I realized how much I really like the the slower-paced early-morning hour alone to organize my day, and to accomplish several tasks uninterrupted.

Already, on Day One, I found myself crediting Ramadan with the positives that came from forcing me to experiment with a new perspective, which seemed valid, if a bit premature or excessive.

At some point during the day, I began to wonder about the big breakfast I had eaten.

I knew a daylong fast is required for Ramadan, but I suddenly wondered if scrambling out of bed to beat the dawn was cheating. I wondered if, like a Yom Kippur fast, the abstinence is meant to extend from sundown to sundown.

The concern emerged sometime after midday, at a point when I was feeling good about the fast, but it troubled me because I know what a sundown to sundown fast feels like, and I was feeling nervous about sustaining that challenge for an entire month. So, I took a break in my day to look up the answer, and was relieved to learn that the early meal in Ramadan is absolutely permitted, and even has its own name -- the suhoor.

As I write, I am four days into Ramadan, and I see that I can definitely do this. Abstaining from food from sun-up to sun-down is entirely doable, and actually feels kind of good.

I have read that part of Ramadan is to practice patience and humility, and to identify with the poor, who may not have enough to eat.

This resonates with my four-day experience, in fact. "I'm a little hungry," I will think, "but I can wait." Hence the patience.

The humility bit feels as much like a recognition of mortality as anything -- not a morbid fascination or death-obsession, but simply a different kind of presence in the body, a presence that is a bit more constantly aware of the body's external needs, and therefore its frailty and limitations. Hence the humility.

And finally, yes, it's true (though it may seem hokey to some, including me) that only four days in to the observance I do feel a kind of newly and differently realized gratitude that I have always had enough to eat. I have never -- not as a child, and not ever as an adult -- had to know hunger, or to worry about the source of my next meal, or to figure out how to stretch a small amount of food to cover an entire day.

There again, I credit Ramadan with forcing a new experience upon me. During this month, I have been and will be thinking about how get maximum advantage out of a minimum amount of food, consumed at times not exactly of my choosing.

So, that's my experience of Ramadan so far. I am also attempting to read the Koran this month (but I'll save that for another post), and I have not yet connected the five daily Muslim prayers to the experience (though I understand that suhoor and iftar should cooincide with the first and fourth prayers of the day). The most glaring missing piece so far, however, is that I have not yet connected with a Muslim community, or community of other celebrants.

I hope to share iftar with other celebrants before the end of the month, and I've posted a message to a local Facebook group of progressive Muslims, so we'll see what comes of that, if anything. I would also like to share iftar with conservative Muslims or in-between Muslims or non-Muslims like myself who are experimenting with Ramadan, and I'm not sure how to do that.

If the Facebook group doesn't work out, perhaps I'll resort to Craig's List, or possibly, without community, perhaps I'll just have to make plans to go visit a mosque (or two) this month by myself.

In the meantime, I have been invited to Quaker meeting by a friend this coming Sunday, and I'm looking forward to adding an austere, silent, early-morning Friends meeting to the asceticism of the fast.